The thermal behaviour of binary mixtures of two drugs (clobazam and captopril, respectively) and a pharmaceutical excipient (lactose monohydrate) was measured with differential scanning calorimetry to determine thermodynamic and kinetic parameters (dehydration and melting enthalpies and dehydration and glass-transition activation energies) which might be affected by intermolecular interactions. A kinetic study showed that lactose dehydration is not a single-step conversion and that clobazam contributed to reduce the energy barrier for the bulk dehydration of the excipient. On the other hand, the physical interactions between metastable liquid clobazam and crystalline anhydrous alpha-lactose obtained from monohydrate dehydration gave rise to the recrystallisation of clobazam. In the captopril-lactose system, the liquid captopril influenced the lactose dehydration: a sharp increase of the dehydration enthalpy and a concurrent reduction of the dehydration temperature were observed. Finally, it turned out that solid-phase transitions were enhanced by the contact with a liquid phase. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.